Pentagon misses deadline on drone lasers, cost undisclosed

The department named four systems for a counter-drone pilot program run by Joint Interagency Task Force 401: AeroVironment's palletized high-energy laser, the Epirus Leonidas high-powered microwave system, the Kord Firefly laser and Boeing's compact laser weapon. The announcement says the pilot will evaluate the systems' "requirements, costs, and best practices."

Congress ordered the program in Section 1089 of the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which became law Dec. 18, 2025. The law gave the department 180 days, until June 16, to select and procure systems for at least four military installations, and one year, until Dec. 18, to have them deployed. The department has not said whether the deadline was extended.

Lawmakers specified the technology, defining a covered system as one that destroys or disables a small drone by high-powered microwave, laser "or other similar technology."

The deployment deadline is 73 days away. The department said it will hold a directed-energy demonstration at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in December to evaluate additional laser and microwave systems, and that it will keep assessing other directed-energy technologies.

Section 1089 also required the department to report to the congressional defense committees by Aug. 15 on delays caused by interagency coordination, "particularly delays related to site surveys by other agencies." The law requires a briefing to those committees every 60 days until each requirement is complete.

The Congressional Budget Office priced a comprehensive defense in July and left directed energy out of it. The agency estimated about $74 million to equip a representative installation, a five-mile-by-five-mile area covering a base's critical areas, with a layered defense, plus $5 million a year to operate it.

That layered defense is built from radar, radio frequency detection and defeat systems, kinetic interceptors and handheld devices, the systems CBO said the department "is currently buying." It does not include lasers or high-powered microwave weapons. Those, the agency wrote, "are still in development in the United States" and "are expected to be expensive to acquire and to need a lot of electrical power."

Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, who directs the task force, made a similar point about the industry pitch for directed energy.

"People will say, if you go with this really exquisite system, maybe it's a directed energy system, the cost is 8 cents per shot," he said at an Aug. 21 media roundtable, according to an Army transcript. "I say, OK, then let me understand the fully burdened cost of that. Because if I procure that system and it costs me $6 million and I take one shot a year, you can't tell me that that shot only costs 8 cents."

"I also want to understand the fully burdened cost of operating those systems," Ross said.

The pilot will run a year with service members operating and maintaining the weapons, he said: "I want to know what their power requirements are over a 365-day period. How many days are they operationally capable versus how many days do they require repair?"

The Pentagon announcement says the pilot program will evaluate the systems' costs. Whether adding them raises or lowers CBO's $74 million figure is not addressed; the agency noted in its report that comparing the cost of a drone with the cost of the weapon used to destroy it was beyond the scope of its analysis.

CBO counted 824 military installations in a Defense Department dataset published by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and said more than 90% are small enough to be covered by its benchmark. Costs scale linearly, the agency said, estimating that protecting 100 sites would cost about $7.4 billion. It did not price protection for all 824.

The Trump administration has asked Congress for $14.4 billion in fiscal 2027 for counter-drone defenses at more than 250 sites, according to Pentagon budget documents.

The Pentagon created JIATF-401 in August 2025 to consolidate a counter-drone effort spread across the services, after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth found that the growing number of counter-drone organizations "often are unconnected to each other" and that the department "needs a single focal point." The task force replaced an earlier counter-drone office set up in 2020.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., who chairs the House subcommittee that requested the CBO report, pointed to drone incursions at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia in December 2023.

"For 17 days, drones flew unencumbered over our sensitive military installations and the Pentagon was unable to respond at the speed and scale necessary to mitigate the threat," he said at a May 1, 2025, hearing on counter-drone capability gaps.

The Joint Force, he said, "does not have sufficient ability to find, fix, track, and ultimately engage these enemy drones at home and abroad."

Monday's release named no contract and no dollar figure, a departure from how the task force has announced other counter-drone buys.

On Sept. 29, the Army said JIATF-401 had awarded 10 indefinite-delivery contracts with $4.15 billion in combined base ceilings for sensors, optical sights and gun-based systems, listing each company and amount.

In May, the department announced a $500 million ceiling contract to Perennial Autonomy for drone interceptors.

At least one of the four systems is already in production under a separate contract. The Army announced Sept. 2 that it had awarded AeroVironment an other-transaction agreement for the Enduring-High Energy Laser program, the Army's first production contract for a high-energy laser weapon.

AeroVironment said the award is worth $464.8 million and covers its LOCUST X3, with options for palletized configurations. The Pentagon's release does not say whether the pilot's AeroVironment palletized laser comes from that buy. 

The task force is running the pilot with the Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Northern Command and the services. The department said the FAA took part in a safety risk assessment during a live-fire laser demonstration at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico earlier this year and determined the laser tested posed minimal risk to the national airspace, establishing a framework for continued coordination.

The Department of War did not respond Tuesday to questions about what the pilot will cost, which appropriation funds it, why the selections came more than three months after the statutory deadline, or whether the report to Congress has been filed.

The House and Senate Armed Services committees and the House Appropriations defense subcommittee did not respond. The Senate Appropriations Committee referred questions about the provision to the Armed Services Committee and said it has not released fiscal 2027 funding text. Wittman's office did not respond.

AeroVironment, Epirus, Kord and Boeing did not immediately respond to questions Tuesday afternoon.